It has become fashionable to lament the state of man — not mankind, but man as in he of the male gender, who is apparently on a slippery slope to extinction.

Whether it’s Kay Hymowitz dubbing them “the child-man” in City Journal, Hanna Rosin proclaiming “the end of men” in The Atlantic or more recently Kate Bolick, also in The Atlantic, calling them “playboys and deadbeats,” we’re seemingly in the age of the woman.

Men are over. Women rule. More women attend college, men were hit harder by the recession than women and the general consensus is that men have become video-game-playing sloths stuck in a delayed adolescence who refuse to marry these fabulous college-attending, high-earning women who are their betters.

The criticisms of men are unfair and also miss the point. Yes, 30 became the new 20 — but that’s because the lifespan of a man moved from 67 in 1970 to 76 today.

Men picked up over a decade of life in just the last 40 years, so why shouldn’t they use it to play and hold adulthood at bay? They’ll almost all eventually marry, have families, jobs, responsibilities — why should they hurry to do that today? Adult life is hard, why rush to get it started?

While the men of 40 years ago were expected to carry the entire financial burden of the household, and so had to get an early start on their careers, today’s man is often told that his future wife will almost certainly work and possibly make more money than he will.

Meanwhile women, that celebrated gender, are deferring adulthood in a different way: using their own extra time (longer lives and also better hope for fertility later in life) to put off motherhood longer than ever before.

It is acceptable for a woman to delay having a baby well into her 30s, 40s and even beyond, ostensibly because she’s focusing on her career. Often, though, these women are focusing more on “Real Housewives,” US magazine, Christian Louboutin shoes and whether Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries is the real thing.

It’s fine to have silly interests (we all do), but somehow the women of “Sex and the City” were bold and beautiful in their cosmo-slurping, shoe-buying ways even while aging and single, but the men of their age are losers for doing the same.

When women are late to marriage and baby-making, they’re seen as trying to have it all. When men do it, it’s a topic of thoughtful concern across the country.

The fact is that all these ruminations on the state of men do is give men an excuse to continue in their suspended non-adult state. The articles give them a sense of acceptance that they’re not the only ones doing it and allow them to continue being “guys” for longer than they would have otherwise before they make their transformations into “men.”